Kamal Mouzawak - Lebanese home cooking : simple, delicious, mostly vegetarian recipes from the founder of Beirut’s Souk el Tayeb market

In Lebanon, I grew up around orchards in Jeita, a small village close to Beirut that is known for its wonderful caves. Men were busy in the gardens, planting herbs and salad greens and harvesting citrus fruits and almonds. And women were busy in the kitchens, transforming the gardens bounties into what we ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinnerand competing over who could do what best. Obviously, each one thought all that she did was the best and looked with pity on the lesser good the others did!

My mother had her cahier de recettes, a notebook of handwritten recipes of dishes or cakes she had tasted, and so recorded recipes like kke tante Eugnie (a cake, in her own way of writing Englishwhen she knew French but not English!) and osmalyieh de Thrse (a pastry), but never a main dish. And she had an old French dessert cookbook, inherited from a nun in the nearby convent, written by Henri-Paul Pellaprat, who wrote the cooking bible of every French household in the old days. Main dishes were never in the cahier de recettes. How could they be? Baking was one thing, but cooking was just understood. It was never written, never taught. You just cook!

You just join a cook in the kitchen, help and watch, and you will learnnot the recipe, but the way. And then you will make it your own way. We all learn the same alphabet, but no two people ever write the same way.

In school, I studied graphic design. But I never worked in it. I worked at Art et Culture, the first cultural center that sprouted after the civil war in Lebanon ended (1991), and that was a great teaching time in my life. I saw people from all regions, the different religions and politics of Lebanon, those who were fighting yesterday but were coming together then around art and culture. It was a common ground that could bring them all together, looking for similarities beyond their differences.

And so I started touring a country I had lived in but had never known (Lebanon during the war was divided into many unreachable parts) and started discovering wonderful people, the same everywhere, who had in common a land, an agriculture, and a cuisine.

I started writing about travel and food, about places, traditions, the hows and whys, trying to understand a bit better this patchwork that was Lebanon. Its a place like nowhere else in the world, where everyone is the one and the other at the same time, and where everybody is part of a bigger mosaic that tries to stick together as much as possible: Christians and Muslims, sea people and mountain people, those looking to the East and those looking to the West all trying to make one together!

Then I developed an interest in macrobiotics and in the Slow Food movement. In the spring of 2004, the first Garden Show took place in Beiruts pine forest, and I was in charge of the food section. I gathered ten of the producers and farmers I knew for a five-day event. It was very successful, and so the decision was made to go on with a weekly farmers market, every Saturday morning in downtown Beirut. It is a producers-only market, gathering the best of our land, fields, and kitchens and the best of our farmers, producers, and cooks. Souk el Tayeb was born, and it later developed into an organization with many different activities promoting sustainable agriculture, including the farmers market, the regional food festivals, the food training programs, and Tawlet, the farmers kitchen. Tawlet is a social business, where profit is generated to support farmers, cooks, and food producers.